


Someday We'll Linger In The Sun

by sawbones



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: All hurt no comfort, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 13:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11875797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sawbones/pseuds/sawbones
Summary: Three vignettes focusing on the love, life, and death of Armitage Hux and Kylo Ren.





	1. Love Letter

**Author's Note:**

> Three fills for the [Kylux Cantina](http://kyluxcantina.tumblr.com/) that focus on themes of loss and death, plus one bonus chapter. Title is from the Gaelynn Lea song of the same name, and is quite fitting for these short stories.

Theme: Lost & Found

Prompt: "Ren accidentally finds the love letters Hux never wanted to show him."

 

\--

 

Hux left so much of himself behind when he left Ben. It had been too abrupt, like a dropped glass. A full stop. A gun shot. A death in the family. There had been no time for the slow accumulation of acceptance. The steady trickle of commiserations, of bills paid and plans made and persons notified. 

It was quick, they said. Mealy mouthed apologisms, like making excuses for the whims of the universe. He didn’t feel a thing, they said. Thank god for small mercies. 

Ben would have thanked god for a cancer. A creeping rot. An ellipse, not a full stop. 

Hux would have wanted an exclamation point, double underlined.

In the weeks and months after, he revealed all the quiet, sacred parts of himself he’d hidden in their home, hidden from Ben. A ring from a coffee mug, concealed under a coaster. Half a packet of cookies stowed away behind the oatmeal. A hundred letters in a shoe box, wedged behind the headboard.

The dry paper whispered like rumours as Ben thumbed through them, lying on the hardwood floor like he’d been run down. Full stops, ellipses, commas. No exclamation points, nothing underlined. Each letter a confession thrown out of the great divide like a dart, some as long as knives, others as short as needles. Each one an accusation. Each one an admission. Each one found its mark.

_you are the unfathomable distance between two stars, you are all the blackness of my night_

He felt hands on his face in the dark, a heavenly body in the bed beside him. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to.

_you have ran through my life like a river, filling vessels i didn’t know were empty, watering lands i didn’t know were parched_

Wilting ferns on the windowsill. Wilting lillies in a vase. Wilting Ben in the next room.

_our love is a wound that won’t even heal over. i will pick and tear at it until my hands are bloody. i want to feel this raw forever._

Starfish can regrow limbs. Lizards can regrow tails. A man can’t regrow half of a whole.

_you are the ocean that throws itself against my cliffs. i will resist, i will resist, i will resist, i will collapse into you._

Someone once told him he had to walk like he had an iron rod for a spine. Salt and water will rust iron until it flakes away. Loss will corrode a man until he crumbles.

_if you leave before me, you’ll come back to me as a scar. _if i leave before you, i will come back to you as a secret.__

Ben put the letters back in the box. He stuffed the box back behind the bed. Some scars were never meant to fade. Some secrets were never meant to be told.


	2. Time Traveller

Theme: Travel

Prompt: "Time traveller Kylo and Immortal Hux"

 

\--

 

Hux held his hand up to the night sky and measured the stars from point to point between his thumb and forefinger. How many thousands of suns and planets? How many millions of years of light? He would outlive them all. He would even be the death of some of them. 

“Where do you go?” he asked, and Kylo said nothing. 

Hux closed his fist around a galaxy and squeezed on Kylo’s silence. A hundred lifetimes laid out from end to end, and it was still only a heartbeat. He could feel him there but he didn’t dare to look; didn’t  _want_  to look and see the edges of him flicker and fray. A hundred lifetimes, lived and reset. Hux was a fixed point, Kylo was not. There was only so many times you could stretch a rubber band before it snapped. 

A kiss on his shoulder. A millennium suspended in a sigh. Hux let the universe flow through his fingers like water, impossible to hold onto even if he wanted to. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be caught, tangled, pinned in place. 

“Stay gone,” he whispered, even as he turned his head and bared his neck, “Let me go.”

A mortal life was a wink of an eye, a breath of wind, a single note in a symphony, but there was nothing so insubstantial about the arms that held him, the hands that pried  open his chest and let the tides rush in to sweep him away. In the morning, Kylo would be gone. In the morning, Kylo would come back. Stars would be born and stars would die, and one day, one year, last year, a million years ago, Kylo would stay gone. Point to point, not measured by light or fingers; Hux only existed in the space between.


	3. Hunting

Theme: Predator & Prey

Prompt: "If travel is searching  
And home has been found

I’m not stopping  
I’m going hunting”

 

\--

 

Hux had spent enough time on the mountain to know what it felt like to be watched. Stalked. Hunted. He was familiar with eyes on his back, the ghost of teeth on his neck; a phantom kill. He shared his territory with wolves and bears, even the occasional foolhardy cougar who came too far north following the deer, so he knew the only thing that stood between him and a death of teeth and claws was his hunting rifle and a slick of commons sense. **  
**

But this wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t a bear, or a cougar.

It had came down the mountain with the spring melt, and whatever it was, it was smart. He had found no fur, no scat. No fresh kills, no dens or nests. When it followed, it walked in own tracks; he’d only discovered that when he doubled back after a nearly getting caught in a squall and found his footsteps still picked out in the snow nearly as fresh as when he’d left them, if a little deeper.

Like so many predators, the nights were when it was at its boldest. It never came too close while he worked around the cabin during the day, whether he was replenishing his stores of fire-wood or starting the post-winter repairs. Hux never saw it then, never so much as heard it, but he could feel the weight of a watchful gaze on all the softest parts of him. He kept his rifle beside the axe and the woodpile; somehow, it did little to comfort him, but time to worry and fret and hide away was not something he couldn’t afford.

Darkness came creeping back over the trees; the days were quickly growing longer after months of night, but the hours of light were feeble and fleeting still. Once the sun went down, the cold at that time of year could still kill a man quicker than any beast, so it was time to retire inside, to bar the door and draw the heavy curtains, and set about his cooking pot on the fire. It was a lonely life and a hard one, especially having known the kiss of luxury and power in his relative youth, but a man could learn to love the simplicity of it. A man could learn to love the loneliness, out of necessity if nothing else.

Hux snuffed out the lanterns and let the fire die down before climbed into a bed built for two, piled with a punishingly poor selection of furs and quilts. The silence of night smothered like its own blanket, and what little sound there was would be damped by the snow - dampened, but not swallowed entirely.

He had became familiar with the sound of his hunter’s uneven gait; he assumed it was somehow injured from the off-beat, almost clumsy footfalls - animals that stalked humans usually were, and so he had also assumed at first that it would either die or attack within a day or two. That had been nearly two weeks ago, and it had circled his cabin every night since. On the third night, sick of his disturbed sleep, Hux had unbarred the door and knocked it wide, ready to confront the sickly beast; he stood on his porch with rifle in hand, and watched something dark slither into the gloom of the treeline. He’d fired a single shot after it, hitting one of the pines in a shower of bark splinters.

The warning shot didn’t work. It had came back the very next night, and every night since. Hux didn’t try to catch it again; he didn’t so much as twitch the curtains. He lay in bed and listened to it circle the cabin with a belly full of ice until the meek light of dawn began to scratch at his window, and he could pull together an hour or so of meagre rest. Something had to change - and it did. On that night, the door to cabin began to rattle.

It had started with scratching at first, so light he almost couldn’t make it out at first, then gradually louder until it forced Hux to sit up in bed, eyes fixed to the sliver of moonlight that oozed under his door. It flickered, interrupted; the handle shook again with a greater violence, twisting back and forth. Hux reached for his rifle left propped against the nightstand before he got up, heart in his mouth, the short hairs on the back of his neck on end. He crossed to the door, floorboards creaking beneath his uncertain feet. For a long moment, he simply stood and watched the door shake until finally - finally, it was too much. He struck the door with the butt of his rifle, as hard as he could manage, and the commotion outside stopped instantly.

A breath hung on the wind, a soft rasping gasp that was entirely human-inhuman.

“Hux?”

Weakness washed over him like a cold wave, robbing him of his own breath. God help him, he knew that voice in just one word, though it had never been so thin and reedy before.

“Hux, please,” the voice said, “Christ, it’s so cold. Please let me in.”

“I can’t do that,” Hux said, and he fought to keep his own voice from wavering. It hurt just to hear him again, so clearly in need, “You know I can’t.”

“I’m soaked to the bone, Hux. I haven’t eaten in days,” there was another rattle of the handle and Hux readjusted his grip on his rifle. He had to pull himself together. He had to knit anger out of his hurt, “If you don’t let me in, you’re going to find me frozen to your porch come morning.”

“You’re not getting in here, Ren,” Hux said, “You better be on your way.”

“Why?”

_rattle rattle_

A voice like dry leaves. Like brittle twigs that snapped when trod upon. A voice he’d heard every morning, every day, every night since they’d left the world behind together; a voice that had said _I hate you_  as often as it had said _I love you_ , and still left Hux aching for both.

“Hux, why?”

_scratch scratch_

“I thought you loved me Hux.”

“I did love you,” Hux blurted, teeth clenched. He’d meant to ignore it until dawn chased him away again and he could make a break for the nearest town. It was more than a day’s hike away but there would be no choice, but even that chance was looking slimmer by the second, “That’s why I put you in the ground myself, Ren, so the birds wouldn’t get you. The cold took you that winter and I dug your goddamn grave with my own two hands. So no, I won’t let you in.”

Hux pressed the barrel flush to the wood of the door. It shook and jumped beneath it.

_rattle rattle_

_scratch scratch_


	4. Hunting (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Technically a prequel to the previous chapter (written to be read after), and an anon request rather than a Cantina fill.

A Chinook wind blows in bad luck, they say: it coaxes men out of their winter coats with an unseasonable flush of warmth before plunging them back into winter when they’re laid bare. It softens the snow enough to send whole mountainsides crashing down on sleeping towns. It thins the ice at the foot of Blackfoot Falls just enough, god just enough, that it can’t bare the weight of the horse and sled that crossed it only days before, but not enough that they can break through from beneath.

It took a day to trek down the mountain on their sure-footed old mare, only a little faster than going by foot since she wasn’t cut for deep snow. It took two to come back when the sled was packed well enough, if the weather held. They could hold well enough for food if they’d been smart over the short summer, and kept up their trapping over winter, but there were some things you couldn’t hunt. Ren traded scraggly pelts for what he could get in town, stole the rest if he had to. They made do. They had no choice.

Hux’s anxiety had began to needle him even before Ren left, but after he had disappeared into the tree-line, it was almost unbearable. There had ridden his life-line, his last connection to the world. He hadn’t been to town in a long time; Ren was always better at the supply runs, somehow more adept among people even when he seemed more crow than man in his black rags. There was the tenuous chance that someone could recognise him, thin and bearded though he was, but truthfully Hux was still too raw, still too jagged around the edges. He always would be. 

Hux, Ren, and a thousand acres of mid-mountain forest: it was a thin life, but it was their’s to live.

So, Hux waited. He checked his traps, and he waited. He hauled in another load of firewood to dry, and he waited. He scraped pelts and picked over bones, and god help him he waited - but when the Chinook wind died and the coal-bellied clouds began to roll in over the shoulder of the mountain like a shroud, he knew he could wait no longer, so he went. 

It had been five days. 

Hux found him a little more than a mile out, curled into the half-shelter of a rocky outcrop. His lips were blue and his damp clothes were frozen stiff, and all he had with him was a single sodden sack of supplies - canned goods, mostly, and not much else. Later, long after Hux managed to drag Ren back to the cabin, when the first fat flakes of the coming blizzard whipped into a true white out, he would remember that he forgot to go back for it, a mistake which could cost him his life in the jaws of winter.

He tried to work the colour back into Ren, as if there was much there in the first place. He burned a reckless amount of wood trying to keep the cabin warm, only for the winds to wick it away in an instant. He piled him with all the furs they had, left himself stiff and shivering as he tried to rub life back into blackish limbs, and in the moments when he dipped back into consciousness, Hux forced a week’s worth of food down his throat. He couldn’t keep any of it down, of course, but Hux didn’t know what else to do. 

In a single, solemn moment of lucidity, he apologised to Hux for losing their only horse; she would still be under the ice come the spring melt, he assured him, and the meat would be fine if he could reach her before the first bears did. He then fell into a shallow, feverish sleep from which he did not wake. 

It was surreal in a sense. He had seen surprisingly few men die during his lifetime, a benefit of his station, and certainly none of them had been in bed. He had heard plenty of milquetoast sayings about how easy it was to imagine they were simply sleeping, but Hux didn’t think so. There was an exact moment when Ren left him, when his trembling body feel still, with his pale lips parted and the hand clenched so tightly in his own went slack. 

It was an ugly, evil way for a soldier to die, he thought; to lie down in bed and close his eyes and become a piece of meat. He considering kissing him farewell, as he had never had the chance in the hours before, but the thought of putting his lips to such cold and clammy skin made his stomach turn, and they had never been so sentimental in life. 

Perhaps, if they had the chance.

He sat with the body for days, though largely not through any choice of his own. The blizzard outside raged on, a furious storm that howled and shrieked and tore at the house day and night in a way Hux wished he could emulate. It shook the door and pulled at the shutters, and he lay on the floor by the hearth with chapped lips and chilblains.  

All too soon, it blew itself out, and Hux let part of himself go with it. The snow was banked up to the window ledge outside, and he had to face the fact that he had lost far more than a lover. He could let himself hurt when the spring melt came and the tears wouldn’t freeze on his cheeks; he had far to go if he wanted to survive the rest of winter. 

He wrapped Ren in a threadbare sheet he’d been meaning to strip down for rags anyway. A meek slope of snow spilled into the cabin when Hux opened the door, and he his through his teeth at the sharp sunlight splintering off the brilliant white. He was numb to his thighs as he waded out as far as he could, shovel in hand, but a warm wind caressed his sunken cheeks. 

A Chinook wind blows in bad luck.


End file.
